Boehner Taps Gowdy to Lead Select Benghazi Panel

Posted by Speaker Boehner's Press Office

May 5, 2014 Press Release

WASHINGTON, DC – House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) announced today that he has chosen Representative Trey Gowdy (R-SC) to serve as chairman of the select committee to investigate the 2012 tragedy in Benghazi, Libya.

“With four of our countrymen killed at the hands of terrorists, the American people want answers, accountability, and justice. Trey Gowdy is as dogged, focused, and serious-minded as they come. His background as a federal prosecutor and his zeal for the truth make him the ideal person to lead this panel. I know he shares my commitment to get to the bottom of this tragedy and will not tolerate any stonewalling from the Obama administration. I plan to ensure he and his committee have the strongest authority possible to root out all the facts. This is a big job, but Rep. Gowdy has the confidence of this conference, and I know his professionalism and grit will earn him the respect of the American people.”

NOTE: Last week, in response to the release of emails showing the White House was more involved in misleading the American people than previously known and the revelation that the Obama administration had withheld these documents from a Congressional subpoena, Speaker Boehner announced that he was establishing a new select committee to investigate the events surrounding the attack on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012.

Let’s hope he doesn’t have skeletons in the closet that can be used to dampen his efforts. I am sure people are looking for private dirt, as well as others who are offering back door bribes...
Let’s hope he is for justice...

Wonderful! Gowdy has experience as a prosecutor and I think will keep things on track but not in any way the Dems can claim to be partisan.

Also, as far as Boehner, in many ways, he’s from a different generation. One when Dems were actually respectful and pragmatic enough to want to deal with the Republicans. The current Dems, both legislative and executive, seem to believe they have been elected to do ethnic - or at least political - cleansing. Boehner just wasn’t up to handling that, and I’m glad he has passed this off to somebody who can deal with it.

I’ve seen too many hearings in the House and Senate to care much one way or the other here. It has been demonstrated over and over that good men or not, high levels of criminality or not, these hearings turn into a farce.

We will see how Gowdy structures his committee and what sort of staff he selects which in turn will be reflected in the kind of hearings he conducts. Ideally, the majority of the questioning would be conducted by an attorney who is not a representative whose questioning time extends to at least 30 min. before the Democrats get a chance to interrupt. Such a minimum time is needed to overcome Democrat witnesses' filibustering to run out the Republican's question time which is normally limited to 5 min.

I think the primary interrogator should be not an Elected Representative but rather a professional attorney because the selfish interests of committee members to get face time on television wrecks the whole narrative by destroying its coherence and prevents it from proceeding logically from a beginning to a conclusion. Moreover, the interruption every 5 min. for Democrats to question with the equal time makes it difficult for the lay observer on C-SPAN to make sense of the preceding.

Above all, it would be a blessing from heaven if the Democrats are foolish enough to actually follow through on their threat not participate.

I would assume that Boehner will behave decently, that is, he will keep his hands off the subpoena process, granting the committee broad range of subpoena power and complete independence and selecting staff and procedure of conducting hearings, as far as House rules allow. How much independence Gowdy is able to negotiate for himself with Boehner is critical and we will probably not know what Gowdy had to give up until long after this inquiry enters the history books

Finally, it is not actually the public hearings where the real productive work will be done but in the examination of documents, diligent demands for those documents, tough interrogations, judicious use of limited or general immunity, and deft relations with the press who will be at best passively aggressive and perhaps even openly hostile.

I have a feeling he appointed Gowdy in hopes that he would be a ‘lightning rod’ and a huge media distraction from the D.I.A.B.L.O. activities that they will be pushing during the same time... Like Amnesty.

Boehner probably appointed the right guy for the wrong reasons... And hopes that a big, popular, conservative thorn in his side will be destroyed in the process.

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